Threat-making has suddenly taken over politics, thanks to the Supreme Court vacancy created by the retirement of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.

"For President Bush, social conservatives, and the senators they helped elect, the moment of truth has arrived," Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention told The New York Times. That's a threat from the Right.

Here's one from the Left: "If the president abuses his power and nominates someone who threatens to roll back the rights and freedoms of the American people, then the American people will insist that we oppose that nominee, and we intend to do so," Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., said on the Senate floor.

The most endangered rights involve abortion. They might get "rolled back" to where they stood before 1973, when the Supreme Court handed down its Roe v. Wade decision recognizing a constitutional right to abortion. For conservatives like Land, "the moment of truth" means forcing Republicans to deliver what the party has promised in its platforms since 1980—a Supreme Court that will overturn Roe.

O'Connor voted in 1992 to reaffirm Roe. Conservatives demand that Bush nominate someone who they can be certain would vote to reverse it. That raises the issue of a "litmus test": Should the White House or Senate require a nominee to answer the question, "How would you vote on Roe v. Wade?"

Conservatives rally to the cry, "No more David Souters." Souter, nominated to the high court by President George H.W. Bush in 1990, refused to submit to the litmus test. Conservatives were outraged when, after winning confirmation, he turned out to support abortion rights. "We do not want another wolf in sheep's clothing," declares Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council.

Many liberals denounce the idea of a litmus test. "I don't set up a litmus test for any particular nominees," Kennedy said last week. "I have voted for judges who have been 'pro-life.' " But Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, has warned the president not to nominate a "stealth candidate" whose position on Roe is unknown.

What kind of threat can liberals make with Democrats a minority in the Senate? They can demand that Democratic senators assert their right to filibuster the nomination, on the grounds that a threat to roll back abortion rights is an "extraordinary circumstance." After all, when a Gallup Poll for CNN/USA Today asked voters whether they would prefer a new Supreme Court justice who would vote to uphold Roe or one who would overturn it, the answer, by more than 2-to-1 (65 to 29 percent), was one who would uphold Roe.

The pressure will be on the "Gang of 14" senators who in May struck a compromise over the use of the filibuster. The seven Republicans promised not to vote for the "nuclear option" that would ban filibustering judicial nominees. In return, the seven Democrats promised not to use the filibuster to block votes on judicial nominees, except in "extraordinary circumstances."

If the president nominates a justice who pledges to overturn Roe, look for liberals to demand a filibuster and conservatives to call for pulling the "nuclear" trigger. "The nuclear option is definitely on the table," Sen. John Warner, R-Va., one of the Gang of 14, told The New York Times. Warner added ominously that if Senate Republicans change the rules to confirm a nominee, "that justice would be tattooed with the nuclear option for the rest of his or her life on that Court."

The threats will be felt most keenly by senators up for re-election next year, including six members of the Gang of 14: Republicans Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, Mike DeWine of Ohio, and Olympia Snowe of Maine, and Democrats Robert Byrd of West Virginia, Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, and Ben Nelson of Nebraska, plus two senators facing potentially close races: Republican Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, a blue state, and Democrat Bill Nelson of Florida, a red state.

In theory, no one can threaten President George W. Bush. He can't run again. But his popularity has been dropping. Further erosion could doom his plans for Iraq and for overhauling Social Security and the tax code.

Conservatives intend to hold him to a declaration he made during his first presidential campaign. As Rich Lowry, editor of the National Review, put it, "One of the reasons that conservatives were enthusiastic about him, going back to 2000, was that he said he was going to appoint strict constructionist judges in the mode of [Antonin] Scalia and [Clarence] Thomas. To back off that would create a firestorm on the right."

Democrats intend, meanwhile, to try to hold Bush to his 2000 promise to be "a uniter, not a divider." Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said, "President Bush should use this opportunity to bring the country together, not to tear us apart." Some Republicans, like Warner, agree. In Warner's view, "This nomination of the first Supreme Court justice by this distinguished president gives him an opportunity to be a uniter, not a divider."

For the vast majority of voters in the middle, it's not clear whether abortion is a litmus-test issue. Most voters accept the view of abortion rights that the Supreme Court reaffirmed in its 1992 decision—abortion is a constitutionally protected right that can be limited and regulated. The co-author of that decision? Sandra Day O'Connor.

About the Author

William Schneider is the Cable News Network's senior political analyst. He is also a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., and a contributing editor for the Los Angeles Times, National Journal, and The Atlantic Monthly. His column appears every week in National Journal, a weekly magazine covering politics and government published in Washington, D.C.

Most Popular

His paranoid style paved the road for Trumpism. Now he fears what’s been unleashed.

Glenn Beck looks like the dad in a Disney movie. He’s earnest, geeky, pink, and slightly bulbous. His idea of salty language is bullcrap.

The atmosphere at Beck’s Mercury Studios, outside Dallas, is similarly soothing, provided you ignore the references to genocide and civilizational collapse. In October, when most commentators considered a Donald Trump presidency a remote possibility, I followed audience members onto the set of The Glenn Beck Program, which airs on Beck’s website, theblaze.com. On the way, we passed through a life-size replica of the Oval Office as it might look if inhabited by a President Beck, complete with a portrait of Ronald Reagan and a large Norman Rockwell print of a Boy Scout.

Should you drink more coffee? Should you take melatonin? Can you train yourself to need less sleep? A physician’s guide to sleep in a stressful age.

During residency, Iworked hospital shifts that could last 36 hours, without sleep, often without breaks of more than a few minutes. Even writing this now, it sounds to me like I’m bragging or laying claim to some fortitude of character. I can’t think of another type of self-injury that might be similarly lauded, except maybe binge drinking. Technically the shifts were 30 hours, the mandatory limit imposed by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, but we stayed longer because people kept getting sick. Being a doctor is supposed to be about putting other people’s needs before your own. Our job was to power through.

The shifts usually felt shorter than they were, because they were so hectic. There was always a new patient in the emergency room who needed to be admitted, or a staff member on the eighth floor (which was full of late-stage terminally ill people) who needed me to fill out a death certificate. Sleep deprivation manifested as bouts of anger and despair mixed in with some euphoria, along with other sensations I’ve not had before or since. I remember once sitting with the family of a patient in critical condition, discussing an advance directive—the terms defining what the patient would want done were his heart to stop, which seemed likely to happen at any minute. Would he want to have chest compressions, electrical shocks, a breathing tube? In the middle of this, I had to look straight down at the chart in my lap, because I was laughing. This was the least funny scenario possible. I was experiencing a physical reaction unrelated to anything I knew to be happening in my mind. There is a type of seizure, called a gelastic seizure, during which the seizing person appears to be laughing—but I don’t think that was it. I think it was plain old delirium. It was mortifying, though no one seemed to notice.

Why did Trump’s choice for national-security advisor perform so well in the war on terror, only to find himself forced out of the Defense Intelligence Agency?

How does a man like retired Lieutenant General Mike Flynn—who spent his life sifting through information and parsing reports, separating rumor and innuendo from actionable intelligence—come to promote conspiracy theories on social media?

Perhaps it’s less Flynn who’s changed than that the circumstances in which he finds himself—thriving in some roles, and flailing in others.

In diagnostic testing, there’s a basic distinction between sensitivity, or the ability to identify positive results, and specificity, the ability to exclude negative ones. A test with high specificity may avoid generating false positives, but at the price of missing many diagnoses. One with high sensitivity may catch those tricky diagnoses, but also generate false positives along the way. Some people seem to sift through information with high sensitivity, but low specificity—spotting connections that others can’t, and perhaps some that aren’t even there.

“Well, you’re just special. You’re American,” remarked my colleague, smirking from across the coffee table. My other Finnish coworkers, from the school in Helsinki where I teach, nodded in agreement. They had just finished critiquing one of my habits, and they could see that I was on the defensive.

I threw my hands up and snapped, “You’re accusing me of being too friendly? Is that really such a bad thing?”

“Well, when I greet a colleague, I keep track,” she retorted, “so I don’t greet them again during the day!” Another chimed in, “That’s the same for me, too!”

Unbelievable, I thought. According to them, I’m too generous with my hellos.

When I told them I would do my best to greet them just once every day, they told me not to change my ways. They said they understood me. But the thing is, now that I’ve viewed myself from their perspective, I’m not sure I want to remain the same. Change isn’t a bad thing. And since moving to Finland two years ago, I’ve kicked a few bad American habits.

Why the ingrained expectation that women should desire to become parents is unhealthy

In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a "safe haven" law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family -- nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

Democrats who have struggled for years to sell the public on the Affordable Care Act are now confronting a far more urgent task: mobilizing a political coalition to save it.

Even as the party reels from last month’s election defeat, members of Congress, operatives, and liberal allies have turned to plotting a campaign against repealing the law that, they hope, will rival the Tea Party uprising of 2009 that nearly scuttled its passage in the first place. A group of progressive advocacy groups will announce on Friday a coordinated effort to protect the beneficiaries of the Affordable Care Act and stop Republicans from repealing the law without first identifying a plan to replace it.

They don’t have much time to fight back. Republicans on Capitol Hill plan to set repeal of Obamacare in motion as soon as the new Congress opens in January, and both the House and Senate could vote to wind down the law immediately after President-elect Donald Trump takes the oath of office on the 20th.

Trinidad has the highest rate of Islamic State recruitment in the Western hemisphere. How did this happen?

This summer, the so-called Islamic State published issue 15 of its online magazine Dabiq. In what has become a standard feature, it ran an interview with an ISIS foreign fighter. “When I was around twenty years old I would come to accept the religion of truth, Islam,” said Abu Sa’d at-Trinidadi, recalling how he had turned away from the Christian faith he was born into.

At-Trinidadi, as his nom de guerre suggests, is from the Caribbean island of Trinidad and Tobago (T&T), a country more readily associated with calypso and carnival than the “caliphate.” Asked if he had a message for “the Muslims of Trinidad,” he condemned his co-religionists at home for remaining in “a place where you have no honor and are forced to live in humiliation, subjugated by the disbelievers.” More chillingly, he urged Muslims in T&T to wage jihad against their fellow citizens: “Terrify the disbelievers in their own homes and make their streets run with their blood.”

A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses.

As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions—sights, sounds, textures, tastes—are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it—or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion—we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like.

The same part of the brain that allows us to step into the shoes of others also helps us restrain ourselves.

You’ve likely seen the video before: a stream of kids, confronted with a single, alluring marshmallow. If they can resist eating it for 15 minutes, they’ll get two. Some do. Others cave almost immediately.

This “Marshmallow Test,” first conducted in the 1960s, perfectly illustrates the ongoing war between impulsivity and self-control. The kids have to tamp down their immediate desires and focus on long-term goals—an ability that correlates with their later health, wealth, and academic success, and that is supposedly controlled by the front part of the brain. But a new study by Alexander Soutschek at the University of Zurich suggests that self-control is also influenced by another brain region—and one that casts this ability in a different light.

A new survey suggests many might prefer a kind of multipolar Washington, with three distinct orbits of power checking each other.

Does Donald Trump have a mandate?

Though last month’s election provided Trump and his fellow Republicans unified control of the White House, House of Representatives, and Senate for the first time since 2006, the latest Allstate/Atlantic Media Heartland Monitor Poll shows the country remains closely split on many of the key policy challenges facing the incoming administration—and sharply divided on whether they trust the next president to take the lead in responding to them.

In addition, on several important choices facing the new administration and Congress, the survey found that respondents who voted for Trump supported a position that was rejected by the majority of adults overall. That contrast may simultaneously encourage Trump to press forward on an agenda that energizes his coalition, while emboldening congressional Democrats to resist him.